By Vaclav Smil: Energy Revolution? More like a Crawl

Vaclav Smil is an intelligent, wise, and knowledgeable expert on a wide range of scientific and social topics related to energy. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, and is a respected author of many books.

In this September 2015 talk at McGill University he touches on many important topics including:

We are a fossil fuel civilization and will remain so for a long time.

Over the last 25 years we have reduced our dependence on fossil energy by only 3%.

Power density is critical when comparing energy alternatives.

Renewable energy is not renewable and does not have the density to replace fossil energy.

Green products are not green.

Nuclear energy is dead. What’s left is being developed in the wrong places.

CO2 capture is not a solution for climate change.

Developed countries do not use energy rationally. Canada (and the U.S.) are the worst offenders in the world.

Food and energy have never been cheaper and we should expect to pay a lot more in the future.

The solution to reducing waste and energy consumption is higher prices.

Innovation is an overvalued and exaggerated topic. All of the critical technologies civilization depends on were invented over 100 years ago.

There are more important issues to worry about than peak oil including water scarcity, money printing, low interest rates, and high youth unemployment.

Most big events in history were unexpected. We can expect surprises in the future.

Reasons for hope include the peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union, and the fact that we can have comfortable lives at a much lower level of consumption.

I agree with almost all of Smil’s points except:

Smil believes we are unable to accurately predict the effect of rising CO2 and therefore he is not worried about climate change. I’ve done enough reading of climate science to be confident we should be very worried. While we are not able to precisely predict the outcome, the probable outcome of our current path ranges from dangerous to catastrophic.

Smil believes that with fracking and other technology improvements we will have plentiful oil for at least a hundred years. I think we will have energy shortages within 10 years. Our different views are probably rooted in different assumptions about the link between energy and the economy. Smil thinks any oil shortages will increase the price of oil thus enabling new and more expensive sources. I think rising oil prices will reduce worker productivity and incomes which will make more expensive oil unaffordable and therefore supply will reduce in an escalating feedback loop as inexpensive oil is depleted. I also think that oil depletion and consequent rising production costs are the main cause of rising debt, money printing, and low interest rates that Smil worries about.

This lecture is a must watch for people seeking to understand the issues that really matter to our experiment with civilization.

I’ve read just about all of Smil’s books, and he seems to “get” all of the issues across the board — topsoil, energy density, and so on– and then he’ll say some incredibly techno-optimistic think like oil for a century. How could he not know that it is not the size of the tap than matters, not the tank, and that the production rate is about to drop dramatically? How can he not know that we can’t get the quarter of the oil in the arctic (and natural gas, and by far most of America’s coal) because of sea ice and permafrost, and even if we tried, it would take 30 years to put the infrastructure in place, with a dubious EROI for whatever fossils we managed to obtain. Sea ice and rogue icebergs will mow down oil rigs, permafrost buckle pipelines and melting and frost heaves bust up roads and rail – trying to keep them running is surely a huge subtraction of EROI.

You are discussing the most interesting aspect of our predicament. How is it possible that most people, including really smart knowledgeable people like Smil, deny the immediacy and magnitude of human overshoot? I think denial is genetic and is central to what makes us human.

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Favorite Quotes

For explaining why humans are odd
To Varki and Brower we applaud
A great mystery they solved
With denial we evolved
And created the Higgs, overshoot, and God

Denial not only makes us believe in god, it is god, because denial created us, and denial may destroy us.

The human brain, the God it believes in, and the overshoot it enabled and denies, all resulted from the same improbable genetic adaptation that occurred about 100,000 years ago.

Denial is the reality that must be most aggressively denied to avoid collapsing the house of cards that keeps us functioning.

The most amazing thing about human overshoot is that we do not discuss it.

You know you are in trouble when reduced CO2 emissions from an economic collapse caused by low-cost oil depletion is not sufficient to prevent civilization collapse from climate change caused by previously emitted CO2.

Our only choices are do we want to fall from a higher elevation later, or climb down from a lower elevation sooner?

Things that can’t continue usually stop too late.

Truth is like poetry and most people hate poetry.

All 8 billion of us owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains; 6 billion of us also owe our existence to nitrogen fertilizer created from natural gas by Haber-Bosch factories.

While it digs its own grave, all the mind can do is entertain fantasies and create excuses.

When the only paying job in town is sawing off the branch which you are sitting on, you….saw away! You might refuse to saw and hang yourself from that branch, but the end is the same anyway, and that option is much less fun. (Cynic @Megacancer)

It is remarkable that a brain emerged from a cloud of hydrogen and figured out the laws of physics that governed, and possibly made inevitable, its own creation and destruction.

We have met the oblivious and they are us.

All 8 billion of us originated from one small tribe in Africa about 100,000 years ago that gave birth to a child with an improbable mutation for a more powerful brain that denied reality. The other tribes were soon toast and we took over the planet. We’re all close cousins. I love you all. Except the deniers.

Meaning comes from understanding why we can understand there is no meaning.

Way too many smart people with big reputations are wrong about everything that matters. Something’s gonna happen that gives them an excuse not to have to admit they were in denial.

One of the most, if not the most, precious and rare things in the universe is the human brain. We have a cosmic obligation to use it and to confirm it works.

Fire to cooking to intelligence to denial to god to plotting to capital punishment to self-domestication to Apollo 11 to 7 billion too many.